As enterprise companies enter the digital world, the world is now more connected and with the extreme growth of IoT, mobile and tablet devices there is a huge amount of data to be managed. For many organizations, real-time insights are critical to the success of their organization and SAP has become their database of choice because it has full breadth support for different database types (Oracle, HANA, MaxDB, MS SQL, Sybase, and others.) To address the rapid pace of digital transformation, enterprises will often use different databases for different types of workloads, and in a typical enterprise data center today, you will see several SAP databases, each handling a specific business need and workload. SAP databases are frequently used in disciplines such as manufacturing, human resources and banking. SAP databases are also useful for airlines that need to store ticket service and passenger information, as well as universities maintaining student databases. Really anywhere there are large amounts of data being collected and stored.
While SAP does provide a few native backup and recovery options, these native tools often lack robust functionality and have some limitations:
- It lacks the granularity and flexibility required by enterprises to meet their demanding SLAs
- Offers no protection against ransomware attacks
- Creates data silos that increases operational complexity
- Lacks optimization for scale out data protection storage
Cohesity first announced the support for SAP HANA in December 2019 to address the evolving business requirements of our customers, we are excited to expand our support for the SAP portfolio, and add to our certified solutions for the SAP portfolio. This increased support delivers our customers simplicity through automation, exceptional performance, and unified management across on-premises and cloud-based systems. With the 6.6.0b release, we now include support for the full spectrum of SAP databases — HANA, Oracle, MaxDB, Sybase, and third-party databases like DB2 and MS SQL — bringing the power of our Helios engine to any SAP-supported database.
Cohesity customers can now discover, register, and keep their mission-critical SAP estate protected with policies that configure backup frequency, retention, archival, and replication. In addition, Cohesity added optimization that allows organizations to leverage the Cohesity scale out architecture to improve write and read performance of backups and restore.
Through Cohesity Helios, a multi-cloud data management platform, both IT and backup admin teams can view the status of their data, log backups, and restore jobs, all from a centralized user interface. They can also view a summary of backup and recovery activity, identify the latest recovery points, and quickly identify which backups need attention across different SAP databases. In addition, both IT and backup admins can now generate reports and receive alerts on status of all backups and restore.
Cohesity allows you to do all this without affecting the ability of SAP admins to perform on-demand backup and restore operations, if needed, using native tools such as SAP Cockpit, BrTools, SAP HANA Studio, etc.
Simplify Your Workflows
Cohesity delivers its powerful policy automation by directly integrating with the SAP-certified BackINT interface as a Connector. All you have to do is deploy the Cohesity Agent, Connector and register your SAP hosts with Cohesity DataProtect where all the SAP databases in the environment are discovered, and then you can assign a Cohesity policy of your choice.
Solution Benefits
There are many factors that go into selecting the right backup and recovery solution for your database applications. It is important to ensure that the solution you use meets your needs not just today, but well into the future. You will want a solution that can address several key considerations, including:
- Simplify Operations. Admins use SAP native tools for most of their day-to-day activities, and data protection is an integral piece of SAP administration. Cohesity abstracts the complexity of these tools by integrating with them, so customers can continue to deploy SAP tools to trigger their backups and restores from within Helios. Even infrastructure and backup admins who are not well versed with these backup tools can configure a backup and perform a recovery using Cohesity’s single pane of glass interface.
- Automation. In large-scale deployments of SAP databases, manual management of connectors is not scalable and a significant pain point, delaying upgrades and consuming valuable administrator time. The Cohesity Connector is a self-managed package that does not require any manual steps on the SAP hosts apart from deploying the Connector and the Cohesity Agent. From there, everything that is required, including any BackINT configuration, is automatically configured on the SAP database.
- Flexibility. In a typical Dev/Test environment, be it on-prem or in the cloud, admins get frequent requests to roll back a database to an earlier, stable version. Cohesity delivers point-in-time recoveries for SAP databases by leveraging data and log backups. By rolling log backups forward, on top of the data backups, Cohesity enables admins to pick from any granular recovery point in the SAP database.
- Protection against ransomware attacks. Cohesity offers multi-layer protection against even the most sophisticated ransomware. With immutable backup snapshots, WORM, MFA, and granular controls with RBAC, Cohesity keeps the backup data and the platform secure against attacks. The machine learning-based anomaly detection scans the backup data to detect a potential ransomware attack on the production environment.
- Test & Dev: Cohesity empowers developers to instantiate the latest backup of their production application stack and run it directly from the Cohesity platform, providing a unified foundation for copy data management. Instant, zero-space clones enable businesses to quickly spin up test/dev environments from a backup or existing file share, enabling rapid test and development from actual data without any capacity overhead.
- Across All Environments: Whether customers are aiming to deploy their SAP databases on-premise or in the cloud, protecting mission-critical data is always crucial. Cohesity’s software defined backup and recovery solution allow enterprises to protect their SAP databases regardless of where they are deployed, on-premises or in the public cloud.
Conclusion
Cohesity is committed to providing simplified backup and rapid recovery for your SAP databases. Whether your SAP systems are on-prem, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment, Cohesity delivers a robust, plug-and-play approach for your mission-critical SAP environments today and into the future.
